Pavilion LXVI

The Art of Seduction

I woke slung face-first over the back of a red divan with a copper tureen below me. It was not filled with vomit.

“Ah, you’re awake!” Louis said, clapping me on the back as I raised my head. “Time to gee-ay suit-sway de joe, as they say, no?”

There was now vomit in the tureen. “Jie suzui de jiu,” I coughed.

Louis nodded. “Of course. But let’s take a walk. I’ll bring a bottle.”

I’ve mentioned that Yangzhou is known for its lakes. It is also known for its gardens. Though I was in no mood to be alive, myself, I allowed Louis to lead me to the “garden of the immortal conk.” The trees here were covered with mushrooms that stuck out from the trunks like shelves.

“You’ve told me this story about Iron Ball Wang before, you know?” Louis had been listening obligingly, almost pryingly, to the details of my journey from Peking.

“Excuse me?”

“Well, perhaps your Father Zoetmulder also knew Brother Tranquility, but Iron Ball’s story is remarkably similar to one of the wuxia tales that you told me you heard as a child.”

I considered this.

“I’m sure the resemblance of the stories was merely cosmetic,” I eventually said. “However, this drawing between things of correspondences is not necessarily without meaning. It is the first step not only of magic, but of science and art as well. Which reminds me that I need to tell you about the vision I experienced of the iterated memoria locale. It’s a calculating engine like no other, and—”

“I don’t think you need to tell me about this, at least right now.”

“But it relates to our present situation. The way that these ideas are drawn together is much like the way that all of our paths have converged here in Yangzhou. It gives me hope that I’m on the right track after all,” I said. “Despite so many seeming setbacks.”

“What do you mean?” Gao asked when I returned to this subject later back in the House of Vernal Delights, and then he tossed a cup of wine down in one gulp. Zhang was no longer to be found, apparently sleeping off a hangover.

“Well, all of us coming together like this can’t just be coincidental. It certainly argues for some grand design to it all. With everything pointing directly to Fuzhou. It seems it’s where I’m meant to go.”

“Your reasoning is abductive at best,” Louis scoffed, only belatedly adding a dismissive flip of the hand.

“And what’s wrong with that?” I huffed. “Abduction was good enough for Aristotle.”

“What does Aristotle have to do with Fuzhou?” Gao asked. “And just who is this Marcelle?”

Louis ignored him. “For one thing, it’s not even particularly good abductive reasoning,” he said to me. “Complexity and coincidence does not necessitate any grand design. An unlikely assemblage of acquaintances have all found come together in Yangzhou. You learned from one that Marcelle is in Fuzhou. Therefore some grand design has brought you to Yangzhou so that you’ll turn around and go to Fuzhou. If you were designing something, wouldn’t you try to keep it simple?”

I thought for a moment. “Well, I may be using abductive reasoning, but you’re resorting to sophistry!”

“And what’s wrong with that?” he asked, echoing my own words in a mocking imitation of my voice.

I may have snorted. “Unlike you, I can actually answer that question. By definition—”

“By whose definition? Plato’s? Or are we back to Aristotle? Before the two of them came along, the sophists were respected teachers. It’s only due to Platonist slander that they have such a bad reputation today.”

I sighed. “Be serious. You don’t truly propose a defense of the sophists?”

“This is precisely why, in the past, I’ve always made a point of only keeping the company of one Jesuit at a time,” Gao said, reaching across the table and grabbing my untouched cup of wine for himself.

Louis shrugged. “I’m perfectly serious. There is much we might learn from the sophists’ example.”

To say the least, I was surprised. Despite his comments in Peking portraying those of our own order as casuists, I’d thought at the time that he was merely being flippant. Playing at the Devil’s Advocate. But what he was saying now went against everything the Jesuits stood for. Much as the Black Sand Palm was a forbidden school of gong fu, so might sophistry be described as a forbidden school of thought, at least among those who hold philosophy in any high regard.

“I haven’t really seen much of Yangzhou, yet,” Gao said. “And I was hoping to ask around about the Red Boats.”

“Do you remember, once, I asked you why you wanted to go to China?” Louis asked me, ignoring Gao.

I told him I did.

“You had many justifications, but you never had an answer,” he said. “The fact is, you wanted to go, and so you listed all of the reasons that supported that desire. But it’s not as if you sat down beforehand, looked at all the facts, and logically deduced that going to China was the right thing to do. That’s not how decisions are made.”

I nodded again in tentative agreement, if only for the sake of not following him down some tangential path of argumentation. “Fine, and now I want to go to Fuzhou. I may not have worked out the logic of that choice, but I’m pretty sure it’s the right decision to make. So what?”

“Well, first of all, it shows just how relevant sophistry is to life as it’s lived,” he said. “Aristotle’s logic has its uses, of course; abduction, induction, and deduction are all valuable tools for reasoning and broadening one’s assumptions about the world... But sophistry teaches us the art of reasoning through seduction, and that’s the art of putting knowledge to use.”

He was gaining momentum, and I wasn’t quick enough to stop him. Besides, I was interested to see if there was anything more to his argument than wordplay.

“Who cares if an argument doesn’t hold up under the closest scrutiny, as long as it convinces?” he asked. “If a person’s mind is made up, no amount of logic can change it. But sophistry can succeed where logic fails. The minds of a nation can be molded through seductive ideas. There are no rules, no limits to what a sophist can accomplish. A sophist can ask the most important question of all: ‘Which would you rather believe?’ This falls outside the arsenal of the strict logician.”

“Well, I’m convinced,” Gao said, finishing off my wine and reaching his hand for Louis’s only to have it slapped away. “There are a few varieties of Fujianese tea that I’ve been meaning to sample. And I’d like to see Turnbladh again.” Zhang added a particularly fricative snore.

Louis looked to me for some response to what he said, but I remained silent for a further moment in thought. “And what exactly motivated this shift in your philosophy?” I asked.

“More a growth than an outright shift, I’d say. I’ve long realized that sophistry is the tool with which statesmen move the masses. Those who rely on logic are left by the wayside of history’s long road.”

“So this comes back to your politics?” I asked.

“Doesn’t everything?”

“Fine,” I sighed. “Have it your way. Sophistry is wonderful. Again, what does this have to do with anything? Where does it leave us?”

“Precisely nowhere,” he laughed. “Or, rather, wherever you’d like to be. I wouldn’t dare try to convince a rational mind like your own of anything. Oh, and I made up that bit about Father Zoetmulder having given you a wuxia tale that reminded me of Iron Ball Wang’s story.”

“What?”

“Or, wait, did I? It’s not as if I actually recall every story you told me. But perhaps it’s somewhere deep in the palace of my memory, a room I can no longer access, lying along some vector forever parallel to me no matter how I turn. But, regardless, the question you have to answer now is ‘Do you want to go to Fuzhou?’”

“I thought I’d already made that clear.”

“Then that’s where we’ll go. But I just want you to recognize that there’s no greater meaning to it. I’ll be the first to admit that today’s events seem like an amazing coincidence. And that’s precisely what they are. But they’re also nothing more than that. How do they change anything? What significance do they have? I could have told you where to find Marcelle even if I’d been the only person you met here. So I’m meaningful, of course. But ask yourself what bearing the presence here of Turnbladh, Kohn, or Zhang has on anything?”

Gao was the only real reason that I’d come to Yangzhou, and otherwise I’d never have met with Louis, and been told of Marcelle, and met her father—Turnbladh—and met again with Zhang—who reminded me of Zheng, the man who’d convinced me Marcelle was dead—and through all of this determined to go to Fuzhou: so reminded the angel Raziel. Yes, and I would have gone straight to Fuzhou instead: so replied the angel Chaigidel. “It’s not quite so simple,” I said.

“Ah, but I almost had you convinced,” Louis answered. “And that’s all that counts.”

“What did I miss?” Little Whirlwind Tang had returned, dressed again in the clothes of a young man and seeming of a better temper than she’d been when she’d left.

“Idle chatter,” Louis answered without looking at her. “Shouldn’t you change, as well?” he asked me.

I nodded. “Yes. I suppose I should.”

Gao and Louis rose with me from the table. The two of them waited outside while Tang helped me to remove my makeup and change back into the Daoist robes that Father Longevity had given me.

“Is everything right with you?” she asked.

“Right,” I said.

“Are you thinking of that horse girl?” she asked.

“I was,” I said. I looked at her, wondering how I could have failed to recognize those emerald eyes set in the face of Fly-Catcher Yi. “But now I’m not.”

The Image:

A four-row abacus.

Translator’s Commentary:

“Jie suzui de jiu” basically means “hair of the dog.” Seduction. What did I know of seduction? The stories you’re fed as a child lead you to believe that the underdog always wins, nice guys finish first, Duckie gets to dance with Kristy Swanson at the end of Pretty in Pink even though she’s arguably hotter than Molly Ringwald. In the long run, I suppose I can’t complain. But I suppose I’m saying that my confidence has always been misplaced. As Dumbo puts his in the feather, I put mine in the fact that of course I was the hero of the story. Of course I win the race, get the girl, live forever. Success through ignorance that I was supposed to lose. Oh, on the subject of the translation itself, “abduction” might not be the best word here, but based on the context, I think it fits. Quesada uses the Greek, “άπαγωγή.” Also, a little further on, he clearly writes “the angel Chaigidel,” but as near as I can tell he should have written “the Qlipha Ghogiel.” Chaigidel is an alternate name for Ghogiel, but this might be a little like “Pekin” vs. “Beijing.” In either case, though, it’s not the name of an angel, it’s the name of the shadow of the Sephirah Chokhmah, which is itself associated with the angel Raziel. So take that for what it’s worth.

Editor’s Judgment:

I’m not supposed to talk about this. But some of this chapter really resonates with me. For much of my recent life, I’ve been—to a lesser or greater degree—involved with this… organization, let’s say. Not to sound too Bond villain-y, but let’s call it “Libra.” And not to sound too esoteric, but as far as correspondences go: Libra, 22, Justice, 253, Geburah to Tiphereth, Emerald Green, Maat, Yama, contemplation of a corpse that is hacked and scattered, Vulcan, Elephant, Aloe, The Cross of Equilibrium, a dark man with a spear and laurel in his right hand and a book in his left… 253 sums to ten, as noted in Twin Peaks: The Return, where it is referred to as “the number of completion.” 22, two twos. Two being the number of Ghogiel. For those who know. But to be less abstruse, let’s actually just call the organization “the Balance.” Now, some time ago, I was supposed to undergo an initiation of sorts in the Balance. Kind of like a promotion. I was excited, so I went out with some non-Balance friends the night before, and in my drunkenness I said some things that alluded a little too directly about what the next day was going to represent for me. So I turn up for my promotion ceremony, though, royally hungover, and as it begins I start to remember what I said, and I realize how big of a mistake I’d made, and my chakras went dark all down my spine as I began to fear that my colleagues in the Balance somehow knew what I had done. And at that point I vomited in the tureen. This rather than any knowledge of my indiscretions put my standing in the Balance into an uncomfortable limbo that stands to this day. I haven’t been allowed back. Nor has Saladin allowed me to leave his tent. But anyway, yeah. The tureen thing kind of resonates with me.